But the tide of communication has massively favoured creators in the western world. Liu Cixin’s best novel Hugo award is one sign the tide is beginning to turn, even if The Three-Body Problem was very nearly kept from winning by an organised protest vote from what Ursula K Le Guin called “insecure white guys”. But while western readers have been slow to notice it, or deliberately ignorant, SF literature is flourishing all around the world.

Liu Cixin may be its highest-profile star, but China’s SF fandom is the largest in the world. Science Fiction World magazine reaches an estimated 1 million readers per issue, eclipsing equivalent US publications such as Analog. It’s hardly a suprise that the nation experiencing the fastest economic and technological expansion in human history has a ravenous appetite for SF. But it remains to be seen whether Chinese sci-fi will emerge as the kind of oppositional force seen in communist Russia, as a cheerleader for unfettered technological development like the golden age sci-fi of the 1950s US, or a hybrid of the two.

The Apex Book of World SF series is an excellent primer for any sci-fi reader trying to understand the field’s global reach. The recently published 4th edition includes work by authors from Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Mexico, Bangladesh and a host of others. Editor Mahvesh Murad, well known to sci-fi fans for the Midnight in Karachi podcast, is unequivocal when talking about the challenges facing world authors of sci-fi: “The misconception is that they won’t be accessible to readers or easy to relate to, and so won’t sell.”

And in the US and European publishing industries, where a few gatekeepers can have an outsize influence on what gets published, such misconceptions have a visible impact on the careers of world writers. “Part of me wants to answer with the word imperialism, but that’s probably too flippant,” says Murad. Flippant or not, the lingering echoes of colonial history surely play a part in the industry’s choice to massively favour voices from western cultures.

“When you’re not from a western mainstream cultural background, you see things a different way – your gaze is immediately removed from the mainstream’s,” Murad continues. “You have different problems, different solutions, immensely different worldviews. All that plays in to your writing. How can it not?”

That difference is immediately noticeable in the writing populating the Apex anthologies. Stories by Zen Cho, Usman T Malik and Haralambi Markov strike a new tone without which the SF genre would be much poorer. It’s testament to the passion of sci-fi fandom that world voices are so often heard via small presses such as Apex, or the new platforms provided by crowdfunding and social media.

Aliette de Bodard, author of The House of Shattered Wings, is one of those who has broken through to the mainstream. Photograph: Eric de Bodard

The African Fantasy Reading Group established by author Geoff Ryman on Facebook has become an invaluable resource for writers and readers seeking to connect with sci-fi literature from the African nations, sharing information on talks, open submissions for new work and new publications featuring African writers. Any observer of science fiction today would have to conclude that as Africa emerges from political strife and enters an uncharted phase of hyperspeed technological development, African writers are certain to produce much of the most fascinating sci-fi of the century ahead.

Despite the challenges, world voices are trickling into mainstream genre publishing. Zen Cho’s Sorceror to the Crown and Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings are two recent high-profile releases, building on a growing body of successful international sci-fi by Lauren Beukes, Aliette de Boddard and others. If any single theme unites these otherwise disparate voices, it is the retelling and reintegration of older, culturally specific mythologies – from African folktales to Chinese legend – into to the science fiction canon. It seems only logical that as sci-fi has become the mythology of today’s globalised, technological world, it must in turn embrace the rich and valuable world mythologies that came before it.